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Bill says that he wants to make the shadows darker, so let me show you something else that’s very cool about CS4. I used to have to go here or here to get to my adjustment layers. Now there’s a drawer for them and they’re right here, and what’s even cooler than that is I’ve got these icons from adjustment layers. As I mouse over them, it tells me what it is so I can quickly learn what these icons are.

I’m going to do this change using curves. It used to be when I click on curves dialogue down here or went up here, I got this new box that a lot of times ended up on top of my image. Now when I click there, it’s right there in the same drawer. It doesn’t get in the way. And cool thing number three or four, I’m starting to lose track, if I click right here on the hand, this is a modification in CS4 that makes it a lot more user-friendly like light room. I now can come out and not only sample a point on the curve, you’re seeing the sample and point that’s telling me okay, that’s where those pixels are correct. But now, I can, not only sample here, I can click and pull within the image to make the change very cool. It speeds up my workflow. It’s just a lot more of an intuitive interface. And so, I’m picking those pixels that are in the shadow and then I’m going to do something that I like to do. What I’m doing is kind of work in curves. I’m going to go right above this point right here and I’m going to move up. And when I do that, I’m going to preserve the local contrast and no shadows.

So if I just pulled down at that one point, yes, it is towards those pixels but it’s making everything else pretty far around those pixels darker. And by steepening the part of the curve very close to this above it, I preserve the local contrast in that area. And the truth about this image is if we turn this eyeball on and off to see what we’ve done, for me it was a little bit flat overall. What’s really interesting is this is making the shadows darker but it’s also making the whole image pop a little bit more. And the other thing that’s interesting is because we’re doing this work in normal blending mode. So we’re in normal blending mode. Because we’re doing the work in normal blending mode, I’m not only changing value of the contrast. I’m also changing colors, so at the same time that I give this image more low in the shadows like Bill wanted, I’m getting more color contrast. You’re getting more of a sense of green and blue now instead of what before as sort of an overall yellowish green cast. So I like this quite a bit. I’m just going to leave that as sort of a global change in the image.

Here’s something else that I’d like to do. I would like to come in to the image—let me make that go away. We’ll make a layer active here. I’d like to comment to the image. This is such a strong idea and I don’t want it to take over the image. Id like to ping-pong back and forth a little bit. I’d like to comment and make these areas right in here darker to make this whole idea rhyme, this idea, so I’ll stay with the image maybe a little bit longer and ping-pong back and forth, and here’s another reason that I want do that. I want to do it because I want there to be somewhat of a visual stop. You can really start moving pretty fast in these directions real bright over here and then move out of the frame.

So the way I’m going to do that, and I love to do is in terms of retouching, I’m going to do that change by clicking here and adding a pixel bearing layer that is now blank. I’m going to change the blending mode to soft light blending mode, which is going to be a real nice merger of the pixels I’m about to lay down with the layers that are underneath this blank layer. I’ve got black as a foreground color, which is what I want. I can now go to the brush tool and I’m going to start at a pretty low opacity. I’ve used the numbers on the keyboard as a shortcut to change the opacity on the brush to 10%. I’m going to make the brush a little bit bigger and I want you to see something here. Whenever I’m working on mask and doing subtle retouching like this, I turn the hardness on the brush all the way down. And so back to the brush, I’m going now to click and where I click, here’s what’s happening. I am laying down black pixels. You can see them right here that are blending with the rest of the scene. I’m essentially making that area darker. It’s happening just like painting. Its additive, it’s not like making a curve adjustment or something and then maybe having to refine it with a mask.

So I can sit here and click and make this change, and I’m basically just trying to mimic that tree over there on the right and I’m going to keep going here. I’m going to go ahead and go faster here. I’ll turn the opacity up to 20% using the number keys and I’m going to keep going. Now, I’m looking back and forth. I’m really starting to like what’s happening in here quite a bit, and let me just keep coming like this and like this, and I’m starting to really sort of mimic that area around that tree in creating more of a visual stopover here at the very end. Let’s turn that on and off and see what we’ve done. I like it quite a bit. I can add a mask to that layer and come in and paint with black on the mask to clean this up a little bit if I want to make it a little bit more definite in terms of where the dark and light pixels are in this on this particular layer.

So here’s where we started. Here’s where we ended up. There’s a lot more we could do. One of the things I might think about doing is coming in and bringing out some of the red here, maybe pushing for a third color idea. But because we’re not trying to do so much here today, that’s going to be it. I really love this image from Bill. What a beautiful quality of light, what a great use of framing to take advantage on these beautiful lines of shadows, and a great job of creating a really beautiful vanishing point that adds it up to the image.

I want to say a big thank you to Bill for sharing his image on the Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique and I’d love to hear your feedback about this particular Daily Critique today and whether this worked or not, and if it does, then maybe about once or so a week, I’ll find an image that doesn’t need a whole lot of editing and we can get in some Photoshop ideas as well.

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